


Sleep Paralysis

by Neons



Category: Marble Hornets
Genre: Angst, Gen, Grief, Guilt, Implied/Referenced Character Death, It's Not Really Important, idk when this is supposed to take place, sometime between mid-s2 and s3 i guess
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-06
Updated: 2020-07-06
Packaged: 2021-03-04 23:08:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 737
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25104445
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Neons/pseuds/Neons
Summary: He's so very aware that those bridges can never be un-burned.
Kudos: 2





	Sleep Paralysis

**Author's Note:**

> Sometimes you have an emotional meltdown at one in the morning and have to project a bunch of near-incomprehensible garbage onto the nearest character oops

Alex thinks he's handling this ok, all things considered. Just treat it as another chore, he tells himself. Brush the dirt off your pants, wash the blood from your hands, the body disappears, and you tick one more victim of the disease off the perpetually-growing list in your head. It's right, what he's doing is right. The sole defense against the plague, the one making the ugly sacrifice, the one weighing the needs of the many over the lives of those few closest to him. It's right, it has to be done, someone has to do it, he tells himself.  
  
The isolation makes it hard. Sometimes he almost wishes someone was there to help him, to understand why he had to do all this. But that's irresponsible, he knows. He burned those bridges for a reason. The whole point is to slow the spread, dragging someone else into what his life had become would just give It another carrier. He learned that the hard way with Jay. He should have learned it with Amy.  
  
He's so very aware that those bridges can never be un-burned, no matter how much he wants it.  
  
No, he had to do this alone. And he had accepted that long ago.  
  
But some nights he still wakes up shaking, the sleep paralysis demons of his dead friends staring him down from the foot of his bed, and the weight of everything he's done threatens to crush his ribcage.  
  
It hurts. It hurt to hurt them. It hurts to know that the ones that remain will hate Alex for as long as it takes to hunt them down and probably far, far beyond that. It hurts to be alone in this. It hurts to miss them.  
  
They say nothing, only watch him lie there and shake. Almost like the ones in the masks (But those two are always too quick to run, too smart to just lie on the sacrificial alter and join the others in his room, aren't they?) and on some level his slowly-waking brain knows they're just hallucinations but he so desperately wants them to be real, wants to discover that he failed his mission two or three or five more times than he originally thought. Wants them to be as angry with him as the living all are. He wants them to yell at him, maybe hurt him, willing to take any punishment as proof that they're still alive somehow. They just stand there with their blank, dead stares.  
  
His eyes roll around in their sockets, trying to focus on seeing the entire group at once, as he struggles with the remnants of sleep still holding him to his bed. He begs his arms and legs to move so he can reach for them, hold his friends close, tell them he loves them, beg for forgiveness he knows he doesn't deserve. By the time he can so much as lift a hand towards them, they're already beginning to fade out of sight. By the time he's gained enough control over his body to sit up, they're gone.  
  
Alex doesn't cry very often anymore. The sobs shaking his frame feel almost foreign to him at this point. He'd almost forgotten how much that hurt too. He feels so small, so alone, calling out each of his friends' names into the darkness between shuddering gasps for air, as if to conjure them back into the world of the living for just a few more moments. Shouts out apologies and regrets and promises as empty as he doesn't want to feel ever again.  
  
He finally gives up when his shouting leaves him coughing with the taste of iron in his throat (He was going to get a noise complaint for that, probably. Not that he was going to be there much longer anyways) and curls in on himself, wrapping his arms around his shivering body. He doesn't want to fall back asleep, afraid of more visits from ghosts or something worse, but his head hurts and the room seems darker than it was before with tears blurring his vision. Before he can even fight it, he's out.  
  
When Alex opens his eyes his friends are there, they understand, they forgive him. They hold him close and tell him how much they miss him and how much they love him. Those are always the hardest to wake up from.  
  
Alex wakes up anyways.


End file.
